Coincidentally, given the IPST conference takes place in Berkeley next weekend, THIS weekend there is an Open Science summit, also at Berkeley (http://opensciencesummit.com/) -- indeed, it has literally JUST opened as I write. (I'm not there, but several colleagues of mine are.)

These folks are borrowing a page (or, more precisely, borrowing the whole bible -- whole cloth, as it were! from open source software -- arguing that all data and knowledge should be all instantaneously free flowing, and blah blah blah. Now, I must admit to being somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand, sure, I don't want to have to pay for papers that I can't get otherwise (although you can get mostly anything by just asking the author), and I try to make everything I do openly available, and I like it when other people do, and it bugs me when someone patents a gene, and I feel a pang of jealousy when someone make a billions bucks on something that I published and forgot about. But on the other hand, in the extreme, what these folks really sem to want seems crazed: Do I really want the data from my instruments dumped onto the internet? Do I really want to have to pour through not only my data (which I barely have time to do), but everyone else's if it was all being dumped onto to internet? Do I really want to show every step of my work as it's happening to everyone on earth? Okay, yeah, someone might see something that I didn't and we could form a beautiful collaboration and win a joint Nobel, but mostly I'm going to be getting hundreds of email from randoms in far off lands (or even near off lands) who noticed that I neglected to normalize my data -- thanks, I did immediately notice that! -- last year! -- Or worse, NOT notice that I failed to normalize my data (last year), and discover a whole new type of cyanobacteria using my un-normalized data...and unfortunately properly attribute it to ME (and my unnormalized data ... of last year!)

The whole thing sound to me much more like data (and theory) hell than data heaven. But maybe I'm just old fashioned.